Mastering Whipping in VP Debating

make it interesting. But as I'm sure everyone who's here is aware, it's also a very complicated speaker role. It's one that's very difficult and one that's very frustrating at times. So what I want to talk about here is whipping more broadly in relation to the strategic aspect of VP debating. So I want to focus less on the basics of what you do as a whip and focus more on what it takes to level up your whip speeches, what it takes to win debates as a whip. and what you should be identifying or what the problems and blunders you might be running into are that are preventing you from giving the best speeches you can. That being said, though, I want to make clear that this also isn't just a seminar about whipping. I know speaker role based seminars tend to turn off a lot of people because they think I never speak whip, I have a partner who does whip. So why should I pay attention? But I think many of the strategic notes I'll highlight in this or things that trickle down into giving opening speeches, giving member speeches, giving extension speeches, and are things that you would generally like to identify or keep in mind in your debating as a whole. That's a fairly lengthy introduction, but there's one last part of the introduction which is obviously this series of talks is being organized for free, so very generously by the Organizational Committee of Sandoe. That's a tournament that will be held from December 2 to 4. There's a pretty cool CAP, you guys have probably seen them. Do check it out, it'll be a good opportunity for you guys to get some pre-worlds or pre-ABP training in. I will be there as a member of the CA team and hopefully we'll have a bunch of fun motions for you guys. So yeah, hope to see you there. What more specifically are we going to talk about in this talk? So I boiled it down into five main parts. The first is what the goals of a WIP speech are. What do you want to achieve? And I think this... first part is something that is really what separates a lot of beginner web speeches from more on intermediate level web speeches, where a lot of the time beginners come into it, and they're immediately confused by what they should or should not be doing. They think this isn't very straightforward. It's not as simple as just giving responses or just giving response, or just giving out the substantive case. It's very difficult to structure things at times. It's very difficult to know what you even want to do at each point in the speech, which is kind of what I want to clarify in this first part. From there, I want to move on into more details about the content. So what you want more specifically in a good whip speech, what kind of content you expect, how do you know what to leave out? How do you know what not to do? I think many speakers have pointed out that being a good whip often feels like an impossible balancing act because by the end of a BP round, there are so many things you're managing, so many different threads of argumentation, so many different ideas that you want to get out. And sometimes the question is more of what can you leave out? What is it that you need? don't have to say in the speech versus what is it that is absolutely necessary to getting you that win. The third part will be about structures. And this, I think, will be a more interesting part of the speech because as debating has kind of evolved, there have been more and more ways to structure BP whips. Some are more conventional, some are less conventional. I want to walk through some of the common structures that are around in BP. I don't want to prescribe a single one and kind of let you guys see what the pros and cons of them are for yourselves. And then the fourth and fifth parts will be more notes on whipping and notes on debating as a whip. So what you should be doing in prep, how you should be working with your partner, how you should be communicating the extension, what you should be listening to in the cases of the other teams, and more broad strategic notes that didn't fit with any of the main points that I wanted to get across. Hopefully by the end of all of this, we'll have time for questions because I think that'll be a more valuable part of the talk. So hopefully we can fit this in. 30 to 40 minutes. Okay, let's begin with the honest concession. Whipping is hard. How do you debate when you're not supposed to give arguments? Seems like it doesn't make sense. I know as a novice, I was very hesitant to give whip speeches or to even do the whip speaker role at all. It was always something my more experienced or more knowledgeable partner would do. And I was kind of relegated to the member position where I could give out a case that I wouldn't say was fed to me, but a case that was more structured, a case that was more prepared. It's very intimidating to go into a closing half and be expected to give a speech without having much preparation at all. Often when you're the whip for CG or CO, you don't know what it is you're going to say. And even when you do have thoughts about how you want to structure the speech coming into it from prep, you'll... so often have to scrap that and come up with something entirely different because the dynamics of the debate just didn't play out how you wanted them. A stellar whip speech can and has many times in the top rounds of many top tier tournaments like ADP, like Worlds, single-handedly won rounds all on its own. Sometimes the member's speech can... be lackluster. Sometimes it can't deliver the extension as precisely as might be ideal, but a whip speech can resurrect the case. It can bring it back, pull it to the forefront of the judge's mind and make it seem like you were winning from the beginning. But on the other hand, it's so easy for a mediocre whip speech or an average whip speech to lose the debate. It's so easy to slip up and make minor mistakes that are enough for your, even a stellar member speech or stellar extension speech to get overlooked. to get unfairly credited, to get weighed against, or to get responded to in a way that's not charitable. So the point here is there are very, very many things that can go wrong in a whip speech, but when you get it right, and when you work on it, and when you work towards getting everything out that you should get out in the round, then your performance can really carry an entire team, can carry an entire case. It's something you'll feel proud of. I know that. there are many speakers who are sort of career in their speaker roles. So their whole time they do PM, they do DPM, their whole time they do member, their whole time they do web. And as someone who's kind of not a career whip, but someone who's been funneled into that position over time, I can say this has been the most rewarding speaker position to do. It's not the easiest to do. It's definitely not the most fun to do. There will be many times where you feel like you let down your team, where you feel like you didn't have the responses, you didn't have the weighing to carry the case. But when you get it right, and when you know that it was your analysis that won the round, or when you know that you defended a case that both you and your partner are really proud of, there's nothing in debating, I think, that matches that feeling quite as well. But that's a personal preference. Obviously, I'm biased. Whipping is hard, but whipping is worth it. Let's get to the first part then. what am I even trying to do with my whip speech? What are the goals of a whip speech? And I think these are important to take note of because a lot of the time, even intermediate or even slightly advanced speakers come into it with a very shotgun mentality. They come into it with a idea that they will just go through their flow of consciousness and say whatever comes to mind, and that will be enough to win them the debate. And obviously, while that can sometimes work, that's not a very consistent or reliable strategy or approach to whipping as a whole. What I think is the more productive way of thinking about it is to ask yourself from the perspective of the judge what you would need to know by the end of a debate from a closing house team or from a bottom half team in order to credit them the win or in order to evaluate their extension at all. I think more specifically that comes in the form of answering three questions. The first is providing strategic positioning. So answer the question why we win. Why is our extension the most valuable contribution in this round? What is our extension in the first place? That might seem a little confusing, it might seem a little redundant. Why is it my job as a WIP to be clarifying that kind of thing? Shouldn't it have come out from Ember? But as we'll discuss later on, a lot of the dynamics of the debate change after your extension has been responded to. And a lot of your job at WIP will be securing the validity of that extension throughout the round, even as things evolve. So even as new responses come up. even as an entirely new extension comes up that probably has an entire different frame, an entire different way of weighing things out or prioritizing impacts in the round, you have to explain why you still win despite all of that. Which sort of bleeds into the second goal of a whip speech, which is to clear the path for the extension. Explain why you still win. That comes in two parts. It comes first in terms of defending against all the attacks raised by the opposite closing. So looking at the responses, evaluating them, explaining to the judge why they don't fly or why they don't take down the mechanisms they're meant to. But it also comes in a defense of validity, weighing your extension against opening. So a lot of the time, web speakers get frustrated or get undercredited and blamed for the extension not being new. It's a lot of the time, especially judges who aren't listening so clearly or listening so intently to the round. are actively looking for ways to discredit a closing tea. They're actively looking for ways to say that the extension is redundant, it's repetitive, it's the same material, it's derivative as opening. And while that's unfortunate, that's not the way debates should be evaluated or closing half cases should be evaluated, it's something that you as the web speaker definitely have to be aware of. Especially as rounds get closer and closer in skill, debaters get better at running their cases and there aren't these slam dunk wins or clear paths to victory you have to know how to play the margins and make it seem like you were addressing all the nuances of the openings case that were in there The final part or the final goal of a whip speech more broadly is to eliminate the chances of any other team winning. So explain why the other teams can't win. That comes in the form of responses, which I think in a whip speech is more in line of pointing out the obvious. And I'll discuss what I mean by that later on when we get to this part of the talk. But what I will flag now is there's a lot of contention about bringing up new material in a web speech, what counts as bringing up new material, etc. I won't weigh in on that because obviously different ag cores and different circuits will have their own opinions on it. But what your job is as a web speaker, knowing that people will evaluate new material or will discredit new material, is to always make it seem like your contributions to the debate come as a direct extension of what your partner has already provided. So you don't want to make it seem as if these are your responses that you are bringing up in new way. You want to make it seem as if these are things that logically flow from what has already happened in the round or are simple observations that any observer could have made with regards to the round. Again, we'll get back to this later on, I think it is an important part. Obviously the final part of this is making sure you don't force. So there are many times in BP when you're whipping on the back foot. where your extension didn't land as clearly as it should, where it might not have been as unique or as stellar as you planned, the impacts weren't as clear, and you now have to save your case from taking the fourth. Or if you're in a break round, you have to save your case from taking the third or the fourth. You have to secure a position. And that's something that you uniquely do at WIP. It's a lot harder for your member to be thinking and doing that while they're delivering their extension. So the goal of positioning your team in the round really comes down to you. And we'll talk about this more again later as we move on. All right, let's get to the content. Let's talk about each of these more specifically. Strategic positioning, why we win the debate. I think this really comes in three parts. The first is kind of constructing the narrative of the debate. And what I mean by that is, while you can definitely sell the extension in a very straightforward, very technical way. So you say something at the start of your speech, like the extension wins on three grounds, one, two, three, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What you really want to do in your head, and what I find is more effective to most judges, is constructing it more as a narrative rather than something that is more technical and mechanistic. So what has happened in the debate so far? Where does your extension enter? And why is it that where you come in is crucial? I'm sure everyone here has heard a whip. intro that goes something like this. What this debate thus far has lacked is an analysis of the interests of X, Y, or Z actor. The reason that no other team in this debate can be credited is because they assert et cetera, et cetera, et cetera about this actor, where we are the only team that proves structurally what their incentives are. You explain in that intro what has happened so far, where your extension comes in, and why... that entry point of your extension is crucial. Obviously, that intro wasn't the most creative, that isn't the best or most compelling intro you can come up with. But in a few lines, in as short a time as possible, as concisely as possible, explains what your entry point or your strategy for taking on the round is. And that's something that you should be conscious of during the web speech. I'm a big fan of... putting this part of the content in the intros of a web speech, but you can also do it in other parts. You might want to front load some responses if you think they're important, front load some clarifications, take out the opposite closing team, and then put this somewhere in the middle. Or maybe even if you're very good at managing your time, put this at the end of your speech, kind of just to leave the judge with the conclusion of where you win the debate. The point is you should have an overarching idea of what the strategy of all other teams has been. explaining why it doesn't stack up to your own strategy, and then explaining where yours comes in. The second and kind of counterpart of this is changing the narrative. So oftentimes, your extension won't stand untouched after your member speech. So if your closing team is as intent as they should be, they're in the round, they will respond to it. Oftentimes, your closing team might even be a lot stronger than the top half teams that came before you. they might have a much newer, much more creative frame that needs to be responded to right away. Or they might just have a new piece of material that changes the debate significantly. A good example of this is in IR rounds, where nobody really has any footing, or nobody has like the, it's obvious that nobody has the complete factual context for a situation or for a motion. You're in CG, you come up with an extension, and then suddenly you discover that CO knows everything about the motion. They have like a lot of spec matter. they have the most informed case. In that position, you want to be flexible enough to change the narrative of your case to explain why it also fits what this new priority of the debate is. So to give a concrete example of this, I remember very vividly debating a motion about Saudi foreign policy from the perspective of the House of Saud. And I think everyone in that round... past a certain point was debating it from the perspective of MBS, so the leader of Saudi Arabia. And while that was fine, I think a very brilliant closing team came in with the simple analysis that the House of Saud isn't just MBS, it's not just Mohammed bin Salman, it's 10,000 people who all have a royal family and their interests are very different from what the MBS is interested in. linked to the motion characterization and this more linked perspective of what the priorities of the debate should be that meant playing while you still fit those new incentives that were introduced if you wanted to stand in the debate if you wanted to have any chance of standing in debate uh yeah so that's part two so you know when to change the narrative the third thing here is to constantly be asking yourself what the debate needs. So after every speaker, ask yourself what isn't explained yet, what are things that other teams are saying but are insufficient, what are the gaps that you can identify as important, and where can you come in. So all of these things will help you develop that narrative eventually when you do have to get to your speech. So keep asking yourself these strategic questions, and by the time you get to your speech, you should have it developed already as a complete train of thought. in your own speech. Part two, clearing the path. So what do you want to do? How do you want to rebuild the extension? Again, I think this comes in three parts. The first is to invalidate their responses or respond to their responses. This is a lot more crucial than teams make it out to be. A lot of teams, a lot of WIPs kind of turn off their brain or tunnel vision into writing their own speech instead of listening to the member's speech before them or instead of listening to the web speech before them. And the problem with that is you tend to overlook a lot of the strongest responses to your case and your extension. That means even if you whip that extension really well, you prove that it's the most relevant thing in the round. There are just so many logical gaps in that extension at that point in time that there's no way a judge is going to believe it. Or even if you don't think those logical gaps are valid, you think the other team had very bad responses. The problem is that the judge... thinks there are all of these responses and all of these barriers to your extension winning the round that you have to deal with. And you don't have to deal with them in depth if you really don't think they're all that good. You have to call out the responses as being disingenuous. You have to call them out for being weak. You have to provide an explanation, at least, for why they don't stop you from winning. A crucial part of this that I think a lot of web speakers are... afraid to do or are kind of hesitant to do is taking cross engagement from opening. So a lot of the time, the strongest barriers to your extension flying come from the opening case, their details, their little mechanisms or little points of weighing that you yourself have overlooked. And when you don't take a QI from opening or when you kind of try to, I think the term box out is kind of outdated, but you try to make them irrelevant by not bringing them up or not giving them chance to engage with you, you run the risk of just having a very good judge who tracked all of their material, bring up the obvious that you haven't responded to. The great thing about taking a POI from opening is you get to see what they think is relevant about their case or what they think is the most relevant response at that point in time. And you kind of get to shut it down right away. Obviously, it won't always go well. There are times when you'll give a bad POI response where you might get caught up. off guard by the analysis that another team provides. But you have to practice it. I think the, and this speaks more generally to a mindset of debating, you have to do things that are hard as well. You shouldn't be thinking about it just in terms of what it takes to win one round. Maybe if you're at the major, maybe if you're at the highest levels of competition, you can focus on what's right in front of you. But if you're seriously trying to improve, like in any sport, sometimes you have to do things that might make you take the L, as bad as it sounds. uh just so you can learn just so you can adapt to them just so you can build the habits of doing things that are hard and eventually get those skills so this isn't just about whipping a lot of teams are afraid of running hard cases a lot of teams are afraid of running cases that are principled because they don't feel like they're good at running principles or teams are afraid of doing econ motions because they don't feel like they're good at doing econ motions but these are things you have to practice and these are things you have to learn to not be afraid of uh that was a bit of a tangent, but I think it's important especially for web speakers to take note of. Okay, the second part of this is extending across frames. So each extension or each argument in the round will lay out a clear priority or what you think the most important impact is. The problem is sometimes the judge won't believe that priority. So you want to show not just why your extension stands, as in it stands mechanistically, you want to show why it stands in terms of being relevant across the different frames that teams provide. So I think this is quite common when teams say, oh, it's not about economic impact. It's about democracy or whatever. It's about this principle that we introduced in our extension. And you want to compare yourselves to those things and explain either why those priorities aren't as important as the other team makes them out to be, or explain why you co-opt those priorities or get them better. The final part. here about clearing the path or this part of the content section is making sure to compare yourself to other teams. Don't rely on the judge to kind of go through these mental gymnastics groups for you. You want to pick up grounds for comparison with each team and win them clearly. So don't ignore your own top half or kind of neglect to mention them in your speech just because you think you are already clearly winning over them. If you are clearly winning over them, you should be able to explain that or clarify that to the judge. in a way that's concise, that doesn't take up so much of your time, and that would allow you to move on to more responsive material. But you shouldn't leave that out of your web speech. So explain quite clearly why you win over your opening half. So our extension provides you with X impact, or it provides you with Y analysis. The reason this analysis is crucial is because it is already winning over top half. That's because top half doesn't do this part. of their argument that is necessary for it to fly, we provide that, which is why we're beating them. Move on to the next comparison. The point is just to make sure you have a comparison to each other team. Don't leave that out. Okay, the final part of the content section is eliminating the other teams. So this is what people classically think of when they think about pimping. They think about responses, they think about outweighing other teams. How do you want to go about that? The first tip I kind of want to give here is sometimes you want to dodge the fourth and build up to the first. So what I mean by that is in harder rounds or in rounds that are very close or in rounds that can go any way, like the call isn't clear, it's not clear who's winning, it's not clear which contributions matter the most, you want to make sure that you don't take the fourth, especially in a long tournament where your goal is to accumulate as many points as possible. So sometimes you just have to pick a team to eliminate. Make sure you eliminate them first and you make sure that it's clear that you are taking it over them and then go up against the stronger and stronger teams that you want to take on. This is one way of doing the response strategy. Another way in rounds where it's clear that you are winning or where you feel like you are clearly winning, you want to do the opposite. So in rounds where you feel like your extension is clearly winning and you have the most relevant case, you want to start by taking out. the second strongest team. So you want to take out the team that you perceive as the threat to taking the first and then move down to teams that you think might take the third and the fourth. So it rounds where it's close, you want to dodge the fourth, and rounds where it's clear, you want to secure the first, you want to build up to the first. The second thing to point out is you should always take out the opposite closing. too many web speakers tunnel vision on the extension and lose to the team opposite them. A lot of web speakers kind of dismiss their closing, their opposite closing, and hear the first words of the extension and think, ah it's redundant, it's derivative, I don't have to listen to the rest of their case, and then they just respond to the opening team. And then they lose, because there was something in the closing team or something in the closing case that was relevant that they just didn't listen to. So make sure you give them time of day. You don't have to give them four minutes of your speech. If you don't feel like they deserve that, they're not that relevant. But you should be providing at least a baseline responsive strategy or a baseline weighing for why you take it over them. Don't let their case stand. So make sure you eliminate them. The third thing is about new responses. And this is what I flagged earlier when we were at the outline. So there's a lot of contention over like what's a new response, what's new material, can whips introduce new examples, can they introduce new contexts, etc, etc. There's a lot of debate over the rules of whipping and I don't want to weigh in on that now. But in general, the way you want to proof yourself from this or you want to make sure that you don't get discredited for being new. is to frame yourself as a logical extension of your previous speaker as much as possible. So even when you run a new response, or let's say you have a killer example, you just know it in your head that this proves the other side's case, but it didn't come out at member, the way you want to go about doing that is to mention the new response, mention the new example that you have, and then link it back to your member. This example follows very clearly the logic we lay out at member speech, which explains that, then insert the analysis that your member said. Or one of the examples that flows from the kind of argument we raise at member in extension is, and then the example that you want to bring up. So you want to provide that new response. You want to provide that new matter. Is this sneaky? Is this unfair to your other team? unfair to your other closing team, unfair to your other opening? I don't think so, because what you're doing when you do it this way is you are still debating with the debate that has already existed. You're not introducing anything new, you're not raising a new argument, you're linking things back to what already happened. So if you're doing this honestly, if you're doing this in a way that is really about the analysis, then the other teams would have had more than enough time to engage with it. and you shouldn't find yourself tangential, or you shouldn't find yourself irrelevant to the round. And at that point it's fair to bring this up, it's a good way to re-strengthen your case, it's a good way to bring up new responses. And even when the response isn't new, or even when the example isn't new, it's just good practice in general to link yourself to your previous speaker to make sure that the extension sounds more coherent, to make sure that the case sounds like it makes more sense. Alright. That brings us to the next part of this. So this is part three, structuring the whip speech. So I have all of this content, I know what the goals of my whip speech are, I know what I want to achieve, how do I say it? There are a bunch of different ways to structure your whip speech, but I think all of them need to keep three things in mind broadly. The first is that you have to be prepared to adapt. There are different structures that work best for different rounds, different motions, different opposing teams, different judges, different circuits, etc. The key thing here is that you, as a speaker, don't get hung up on one structure and don't try to fit one structure into a debate where it really doesn't work out. So a lot of WIPs will try to do an issue-by-issue structure in debates where the teams just ran so completely different cases that it doesn't make sense. You essentially end up with having one issue per team, at which point you might as well have done a team-by-team. Or, um... A lot of WIPs will force themselves to do a team-by-team structure in a debate where both opening and closing halves had very similar debates or had very similar cases, at which point they're repeating a lot of the same responses, they're repeating a lot of the same points of weighing, they're doing things that are redundant and wasting time that otherwise could have been spent on showing why they won the debate. So make sure you're flexible, kind of know which structure to adapt and when. There's an age-old question of like team by team or issues. I think this is an older split in WIP approaches, but the circuits or debate circuits as a whole tend to be moving away from the split. You want to get rid of that mental dichotomy as soon as now. You don't have to pick team by team or issues. The best WIP approach has elements of both in it. So you want to make sure you win the issues in the round, but you also have a comparison and a direct comparison against every other team. The third thing is priorities. So any WIP structure, whether it's team by team issues or a kind of hybrid structure, should make sure you do three things. The first is you want to secure the validity of the extension in the eyes of the judge. That means making sure it stands up to response. That means making sure it doesn't appear derivative of opening. The second thing you want to have is a response to the opposite closing hat. So like I said earlier, you want to make sure that you are listening to their case. You want to make sure that you appear engaging and you're not just trying to dismiss them so you can get away with it. And the final thing is to make sure you have a justification for why you win over top half. That's both the long cross or the short cross, depending on which closing you are, and the comparison within your bench. So explaining why you beat your own opening, explaining why extension is better than them. Any whip structure that has these three priorities clearly done and clearly laid out should meet the goals of what you want to do with your whip speech. I'll go through a few common structures here now. And I kind of put templates and air quotes because I don't think these are prescriptive. You guys shouldn't be taking these as like be all end all structures, but they might be useful, especially if you're an intermediate team, intermediate level web, to kind of get the flow of what you should be doing. So the first is the issue-based web. So this is kind of similar to what you'd be doing in 3v3, what you'd be doing in Asians, what you'd be doing in Australs. This is where you're going to be doing In those issues, you want to make sure that you are directly flagging the extension and the contributions of each team you're responding to. So per issue, you want to frame the issue and explain why it matters. You want to secondly highlight your team's contribution to that issue. Then you want to respond to the relevant material from the other teams, and finally weigh out the material that came up in the issue and provide the strategic commentary. So an example of that might be like, the first issue in this debate is what the interests of X actor are. The reason this issue matters is because the team that explains coherently what the actual priorities of the United States or the actual priorities of the actor are the team that wins the round is preconditioned to believing any of the other impacts. What we explained was, so that's highlighting your team's contribution, what did we hear in response? And then that's where you get to the responding to the relevant material from others. You might want to delineate it. You might want to flow it as what did we hear first from closing, and then what did we hear next from opening. And or you might want to include a part there about why was what our opening provided insufficient to win this issue. And then at the end provide the weighing and strategic commentary. So if you want to learn how to kind of do this structure, or how to master the structure, I'd recommend maybe practicing a bit of 3v3. maybe watching a few 3v3 web speeches, debates where it's more straightforward, where it's not so messy, are kind of the ones where this structure best applies. The second structure is team by team. So the important thing I want to note here is when you do a team by team whip, don't forget to highlight the extension. A lot of whip speakers can get very excited going through a team by team whip and kind of just go into this crazy response mode. where none of it is being tied back to what their members said, none of it is highlighting what the extension did. So at the end of the whip, you've eliminated all the other teams, but it's not clear whether or not you have a leg to stand on. And if everyone has no material standing, you're not winning the debate over them. Again, as I mentioned, you can either go through teams in the order of relevance if you want to secure the first. If you think it's one of the debates that's clear, you want to take out the strongest teams first. Or if you want to get if there's a lot of material, it's a very messy debate. All of these teams have very different ideas of what the debate is. You might want to go through them in ease of response. So pick the team that is easiest to respond to first. Make sure you eliminate them because it will take the least amount of time to do so. and then move on to the teams that are harder to respond to. In any case, regardless of what kind of order you select, per team you should have three things. You should first be able to condense what their case was, so what their main contribution to the debate was. You secondly explain to, you explain your own responses to those contributions, so explain why they don't stand, explain why they're not as relevant as what you have, and then weigh them out against the other priorities in the debate. So for example, you might say something like, I first want to deal with OG. The main thrust from OG is this argument on the economic impact, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Why doesn't this stand relative to the material we provide in extension? That's for three reasons. Launcher response there. But even if this material does stand, why is it that it is irrelevant compared to what we provide in extension? Because that also stands. And then you want to do the weighing there. assuming that their case still makes sense. And then you move on to the next theme. Okay, so final kind of structure is this sort of hybrid structure that is a bit more straightforward. I think this is becoming more popular nowadays, but I know it is also popular in old eras of debating. Essentially, it's three parts. You first respond to your closing, your opposite closing team take out their material and make sure nothing stands. Here, you're not doing too much of the integrated... sorry. Here, you make sure you're doing a lot of the integrated strategic commentary to explain why you're already winning over that closing team. And then the second part of the WIP speech is you kind of have an entire section dedicated to why the extension is winning. Here your approach is kind of a little bit more like being a depth speaker, where you're not so much focusing on the extension relative to specific contributions of other teams, but just explaining why it's the most important priority of the round. If necessary, this is where you point out the shortcomings of opening. So explain why what matters in the debate is this mechanism or that mechanism or this point of weighing or this kind of perspective. And then at the end of the structure, only at the end of this structure, do you respond to the other opening team. So you respond to OO if they had unique contributions left standing. It's kind of done in a more extraneous way. Admittedly, this structure is a little bit more confusing. I don't expect people to get it the first time off, but the advantage of this is it lets you get through a lot of material very succinctly. And it's very good in situations where you need to flip the extension. Or so in situations where you need to adapt to a very strong closing team, or you feel like your member speech didn't do enough to sell the extension. This is the kind of structure you want to adopt, because you're essentially giving yourself like three to four minutes of your speech dedicated to just rebuilding and hyping up the extension. So that's when this kind of structure comes in handy. Okay, so we've gotten structure out of the way. I'm a little bit behind on getting through material. So I'll go through these last parts a little bit more quickly. In prep and in round, what do you want to take note of? In prep, you want to focus on the extension. And I think the general advice for closing teams is you don't want to flesh out your mechanisms entirely. You don't want to do the thing where you come up with like five, seven different mechanisms for a point. Because realistically, they're going to be eaten up by opening. An opening team is going to take them, or you're going to rethink them later on in the round and realize they aren't really that good, and you're going to toss them out anyways. So what's more useful in prep, and the kind of discussion you want to have with your partner, is imagining how the round will play out. So you say, oh, I think OG will probably run this. I think OO will probably run this in response. And I think the ways we can come in at CG are like The details are best left for later on because you want to give yourself many different options. So you're thinking, again, going back to what I mentioned at the beginning, you're thinking about the different narratives your extension can have, the different entry points your extension can have. And those are the things you want to flesh out. You can sometimes prep a vertical extension. So if you think that it's a very narrow round, you want to be thinking, at that point, you don't want to be thinking about specific mechanisms. You want to be thinking about what areas an opening team is likely to leave out and then getting to the mechanism. So you don't want to start with the substantive part of the case. You want to start with the strategic overview of the case. Okay, what are you listening to in the round? So while you're speaking, there are two things that are important. The first is per team, you should be listening to the key arguments, the headers, the labels that they themselves give the arguments, the main mechanisms and weighing that they give to the arguments. and the general strategic framing of themselves. So usually this will come in like at the depth speech or at a member's speech. When they talk about their entry points into the debate, when they explain why their case is relevant to the round, that's what you want to be listening to because that's how you're going to be engaging with these teams. You want to explain why their strategic approach doesn't make sense or isn't what's going to win them the debate. and then play around it when you're launching your own strategic approach to it. Finally, listen to your member. I know a lot of WIP speakers do this thing where they have too much trust in their member speaker and they think the extension is going to come out as they imagine it in their heads. But realistically, Even the most gelled together teammates will have very different ideas of an extension going into the round. The mechanisms might not come out exactly as you expect them to. And there might be a lot of like analytical gaps in your member speech for a whole bunch of reasons. Maybe they had to respond to opening. Maybe they had to respond to the other member speech before them. Maybe they had to take a POI that caught them off guard. In any case, you should be actively listening to your member speech. And... identifying what needs work so you can fill in that gap when you come in as the web speaker. All right, and that brings me to the final part of this, which is broad strategic notes on whipping. And this is kind of like an FAQ section, things that commonly come up or common problems that people hear. The first is, are there any differences in the approach of govwhip and opwhip? The answer is yes. In govwhip, you want to make sure that you leave room for ways to engage with OpWhip. And what I mean by that is you kind of want to be preempting what your OpWhip will do to re-highlight the extension that came up from them. So in GovWhip, it's very crucial that you spend a lot of time taking out CO, especially if CO is strong, because OpWhip is a very powerful position in BP. Just the fact that nobody is going to respond to you. A lot of the things you say will stick. You get the final say on weighing. You get the final say on what is relevant in the round. So as GOPWIP, you want to position yourself knowing that the speaker after you will be very strong. On the other hand, if you're AWPWIP, you want to really take advantage of that freedom. So in AWPWIP, I think the best way to do it is to kind of step back from a... the very technical debating approach. So you sometimes want to step back from the, I need to provide new mechanisms. I need to provide new responses. I need to get in the weeds. You want to be able to provide a more coherent, like strategic overview of what happened in the round as a whole that allows you to take control of what the judge thinks matters and what the judge thinks is winning. That might sound a little bit abstract, but might not sound concrete to you now. That's something that I think you get more with practice or you understand more with practice, but it's something to keep in mind. Two, positioning vertical extensions. How do you do it? How do you have the time for it? You want to start by being honest. If you're running a vertical extension, admit that it's a vertical extension. As soon as members, sometimes you want to admit that it's a vertical extension. But then you want to explain why your vertical extension is the right place of the debate to be extending. So why are the mechanisms that you provide, the extra mechanisms that you provide, the best mechanisms in the realm? And recall, it's not enough to provide new mechanisms or additional mechanisms. They have to be so necessary to the argument that you're extending on that that argument couldn't stand without them. So you really want to sell them and you really want to present them as crucial to the argument flying. The third strategic note you should know is you should know when you're running a small impact extension versus running a big impact extension, because that really frames how your strategic overview of the debate is playing out. So when you're running a small impact extension, you think what really changes in the debate isn't this big policy, isn't this big societal level reform. It's just the behavior of a few individuals. Then you want to say that you want to. describe that situation to the judge. So when you're doing a small impact extension, you want to make the other teams look unrealistic. You want to explain why they're reaching too far, why their impacts don't make sense. On the other hand, when you're running a big impact extension, you want to explain why the other teams are being too unchartable, why they don't understand the full scope of emotion or what it changes in the motion. Fourthly, on opening engagement, again, I think you should take a POI from your opening as much as possible, unless they don't raise them, or they really are just completely irrelevant in the round. The other thing is, you should know, and you should be able to point out when responses cross-apply. So when you're raising a response to closing, and that response also takes out something in opening, point that out to the judge. So take...... flag very explicitly what the material is that it also responds to. Maybe you're responding to the same premise, maybe you're responding to the same impact, and you're outweighing the same impact from opening and closing. The point is you want to be as efficient as possible with your time and find ways to lump things together so you can be more concise and so you can spend less time repeating yourself. Okay, the fifth and final thing is what do you do when you have no extension standing? So what do you do when you feel like you've lost the round, when you feel like you're on the strategic back foot and you feel like the other teams have a lot of material that you can't get out of the way? First, don't give up hope. So you have to believe that you can win the debate in order for you to win the debate. So don't be deflated. Don't come into it with like a negative or a pessimistic mindset. Second, you want to admit it. that there are shortcomings to your extension to the judge. And you want to admit that to yourself. And what you want to do at that point is adopt the strategy I took on earlier, or I explained earlier, where what matters most is dodging the fourth. So take out the teams that are weakest, try to resurrect what you have left of an extension, or try to spin the extension into something else. Maybe the team completely disproved your impact about, like one of your impacts. Maybe it disproved your... impact on family, it disproved your impact on the economy, whatever. Try to see what other impacts you can extract from the extension that you still have and what other mechanisms are still standing and see if you can sell that to the judge. Or if not, sometimes when you don't have an extension left standing or many of your impacts are thrown into doubt, you want to narrow the debate in a sense and you want to make it look like it's a small impact debate. You want to say, we should be realistic here, we shouldn't be reaching for this big extraordinary impact. So what actually matters is this. So even if your impacts get discredited, you're providing a way for the judge to kind of believe that you're the more realistic team, believe that your outcomes are more likely, and in that sense you can kind of resurrect the narrative of an extension. So bottom line, whipping's not all about responses, it's not all about mechanisms, it's this new playing field where you're not just dealing with technical debating, you're dealing with very strategy-based debating in Brit Park. The skill you want to develop as a whip is the ability to kind of take a step back and distance yourself from the round, know what it takes for you to win, know specifically how you can convince the judge that that is what you need to win, and then know how you can convince the judge that you have everything you need to win. Yeah, that's it for the substantive portion of the talk. I went way over time. Unfortunately, there was more content than I anticipated, but I have about seven minutes left for questions, and maybe we can proceed to that portion. So I'm not sure how OC wants to do questions. Maybe people can just like type it in chat or send it to me on Zoom. Okay, so I got a few questions. So the first one is privately, how do you know if you sufficiently taken down the case of a specific team, especially if you're doing the team by team structure. So how do you know when you're, you've done enough responses. I think this is definitely a lot by experience and by feel. But I think the very simple question to ask yourself at the end of a team by team comparison is, after all my responses, can the judge still believe that their impact is realistic? Or have I done enough to make it so that the judge would have to go through so many logical leaps to still believe their impact? So. The standard for when you should stop responding to a team, kind of subjectively, is whether you think that team is still believable after your responses. Other times it's more clear. So if you think that your material already outweighs them and you don't feel the need to make them look unbelievable, then that's enough. So one or two responses might be enough. But if the team is very strong, then you might default to a standard of mitigation rather than believability. So if I can't disprove this team completely, have I done enough to mitigate their impact to such a point that our impacts are more important than them? Can I mitigate them enough? so that I can outweigh them, is the kind of thinking you want to do. The second question is, is there any guideline regarding when to concentrate on writing the speech? Yeah, this is kind of difficult. I think most of the WHIP speeches, in my experience, get written unfortunately very shortly towards the last minutes of the speaker before you do. What I think you want to do is you want to lay out portions of the speech at the beginning, when you enter the round, and then you want to write down a lot of the content of the speech at the last speaker of each team. So you'll be writing down a lot at the end of DPM, you'll be writing down a lot at the end of DLO, because by this point, you should have a pretty clear idea of what the entirety of the case is, and how you plan to respond to it. Similarly, you will be writing down a lot by the end of the member speech or the end of the gobwip speech. because that's when you have the most complete idea of it. You should also be like listening down little responses and little mechanisms as they come out in the debate, but a lot of the hard part of whipping is multi-asking. So someone asked, how do you not get thrown off by POIs or how do you respond to them confidently? I think a big tip that people tend to forget is just take a pause, right? you don't have to answer the POI right away. You don't have to come up with a zinger response. You can kind of wait for the speaker to keep talking. And when you listen to the question, often you can just answer it directly. I think a lot of teams or a lot of speakers try to do this thing where if they can't answer the POI, they misdirect and they try to bring it up to a different topic. And that looks very bad in the eyes of the judge, right? because it looks like you don't have an answer. Sometimes I think you can just give a very confident yes or no. Especially when the POIs are like, do you support this? Would you support this? Or they're trying to get you into all of these little traps. Just give a little confident yes or no. And sometimes you might not even want to feel the need to explain yourself. I know that sounds really bad, but you will do it later on in your speech when you've come up with the answer and when you get... back to the material that they're trying to POI to you. So when they're trying to bring something up, you can give them an answer, a short one sentence, a short one-line answer at that point. Think about it a bit while you're delivering the rest of your speech that you have written down, and then come back to it and kind of reference it. This is where I further respond to their POI. This is where I further engage with the material they brought up. So yeah, take it slow, practice taking POIs. Eventually, you'll get through confidently. How would you handle note-taking? It's always difficult to transfer a note from each of the rest of the three teams to your whip on a particular issue within the round. Yeah, so this is very much personal preference, but the way I do it is I have a separate paper for each of the teams in the round. So I have a paper for OG, I have a paper for OO, I have a paper for my team, and then I have a paper for the other closing team. And I have like a fifth paper where my actual speech is on. So I'm taking notes from each team on the paper of that team, and then I'm writing it down again, or I have like a little mark, or like I'll put a star where I want the response, and then I put that star in the part of my speech where I want it. Um, the other thing is, I think you don't have to take note of everything. It's good to get in the mindset that you don't have to take note of every little detail or every little mechanism that's coming out of the other team. When they have five mechanisms for a point, you don't always have to take down those five mechanisms. What you want to get is the things I pointed out earlier. What is the point they're trying to get to? What is the impact they're trying to sell? What is the weighing they're providing for this impact? And sometimes you can respond to it at that level. So you want to take a step back. You want to. maybe conceive the mechanisms of their case. If they have like so many mechanisms for it, you're not going to disprove it anyways. You won't have the time. And then instead tackle the relevance of the point. Just explain why it doesn't matter, why even with all their mechanisms, it's something that happens anyway, it's uncomparative, etc. How do you save your team from getting a fourth when you know as a whip that your extension isn't solid and the opening is a good team and already did most of the things needed in the debate? This is where you want to pick a team to kill. pick a team, either the other opening team or the closing team, and respond to them and give them all of the responses you can give them. Really frame them as irrelevant as possible. And I think the other thing to note is what a lot of closing teams don't consider is that responses are considered extension material, right? It's not always having new substantives or having new arguments per se. If you have new responses, you have new frames or new ways of seeing a debate, that itself is extension material. And it can often be very powerful extension material if your web knows how to sell it. So you might say something like, yes, opening provides you with all of the substantive details. They give you all of the mechanisms for it, but they never explain why this is important. or they never explain why this is relevant in comparison to this other thing that came out of the other house. And that's where you want to insert yourself. What's something that you can't ever leave out in your web speech when you're using different speech structures? Three things. One, never leave out an explanation of why your extension wins. So explain what your extension does, why it matters, and why that's winning. Two, never leave out responses to the opposite. closing team. So don't tunnel vision on just shotgunning responses to the top half. Make sure you're engaging with the speaker before you. And three, make sure you secure the validity of your extension. So aside from explaining why your extension wins, you have to do a little bit of work to explain why your extension is unique. So why is it something that's new? Why is it something that elevates the debate? Why is it valid? Okay, I'll take like a last few questions. So how do you manage open engagement with the op web? a preemption, especially if the opening half was equally good. So sometimes you will be in a very tough situation where both your opening team and your other closing team is very very strong and you will just have to pick one of them to outframe. You'll obviously have to trade off sacrificing one of them over the other, but I think the way you make that trade-off is you decide who is easier or who is uh yeah who is easier for the judge to believe that we win it over if it's easier for the judge to believe that you beat your closing half then spend uh then dedicate your resources to taking them out first like if you can respond to them in a short amount of time great if you need to take four minutes to respond to them but you can convincingly respond to them and make sure they can't take it over you then make sure you do that you want to be secure sometimes you have to whip for security right you you want to minimize the risk you're taking on as web speaker you And make sure you take out the people you're sure who you're responding to first. How do you effectively track what other teams are saying? I find it difficult to listen and try and write at the same time. Yeah, this is definitely a problem I had too. It's really difficult to focus in debates at times, especially when there's a lot coming out. Unfortunately, I don't think there are many good systems for doing it. The first is obviously to practice. The more you debate, the more you realize that people are following templates. People are following structures where they highlight what's most important. The other thing is don't be afraid to lean on your partner. After your member has spoken, they're not doing anything. They might be writing a POI, but make sure you take full advantage of them. So ask them to write down responses, ask them to track the other WIP speaker or the other member speaker so you can kind of distribute the work. I think what a lot of teams don't get, especially in formats like 3v3, is that listening to another team and tracking a case should be a team effort. It shouldn't just be up to the speaker. It should be something that everyone's collaborating on. What can you do to start learning to multitask if you struggle to do that in a debate room? I think this depends a lot on your personal preference. But for, I think... The easiest way to do it and the easiest way to practice it is try to practice your listening skills. So when you want to practice multitasking, you want to practice doing the things independently at first, right? So you want to practice listening and you want to practice thinking and writing responses or writing your speech. Lots of people get sucked into the part where they practice writing their speech. They go into debate round after debate round and they just keep writing things down. But the problem isn't in writing their speech. The problem is in listening. So you might want to step back. You might want to try to judge a tournament. You might want to try to be an observer for a tournament or watch a training round and kind of just focus on the listening to the debate part without the pressure of having to come up with a whip speech or having to come up with any speech whatsoever. Just listen to what you think is important. Listen to how the speakers are delivering the material and notice what you wouldn't otherwise have noticed in a debate speech. If you're the kind of speaker that records rounds or if your institution like records training rounds, one of the things you can do is go into a training round keep your notes from that training round and then after that round is done, listen to that round pick up on or look back at your notes and notice what you missed. So you can kind of identify the gaps in your listening skills. This is kind of not a debate related thing so much. Obviously different speakers will have different ways of doing it. I know lots of people like myself who are challenged at paying attention and it's really difficult to track, especially when there's so many things going on in the debate, when so many things are going on. coming up. So I don't want to say that there's one clear way to do it, but yeah, practice both sides of it. So last question, is there anything specific to avoid doing as a whip that can be very detrimental to your bench? Yeah, I think there's a couple things. The first is don't lie about what another team is running, or don't lie about another team's case. A lot of whip speakers I don't want to say do it maliciously, but do it because they're a little bit afraid of taking on the material head on. So instead of engaging with an actual argument that the team raised, they'll kind of come up with a straw man or they'll kind of like discredit teams unfairly, especially when they deal with their own top half. So a lot of WIP speakers, especially when you're transitioning from being a novice, will just lie about what their top half presented. They'll be like, top half didn't say this, they didn't say this, they didn't have any mechanisms for their arguments, they didn't have any impacts. And it just gets to the point where it's so obviously false, or it's so obviously disingenuous, that no judge is going to believe you. And as a result, the credibility of your extension and the credibility of your case as a whole kind of become less believable. So don't lie, don't misrepresent other teams, engage with them fairly, take on their material fairly. If you don't understand completely what they're saying, flag that, like be honest, like their argument wasn't clear to me, or it didn't make sense to me, but this is what I got from them, this is the impact I heard from them, or maybe the fact that it didn't make sense to you is something that you can call out, it is a detriment, so they lack clarity, you're just not sure what impacts they're going for, be honest with what your thought process is, be honest with how you're appraising other teams, and like don't lie, or don't make up mechanisms for them, okay. It's 8.08, we went a little bit over time, so I think I'd have to end the talk here. Thank you so much to everyone who dropped by, thank you for all the wonderful questions. Again, hope to see you guys at Sundo, it's going to be a very fun tournament. We also have more workshops in store from OC and other members of the Agipur on other very interesting topics, so hopefully we see you guys there. Thanks everyone!

make it interesting. But as I'm sure everyone who's here is aware, it's also a very complicated speaker role. It's one that's very difficult and one that's very frustrating at times.

So what I want to talk about here is whipping more broadly in relation to the strategic aspect of VP debating. So I want to focus less on the basics of what you do as a whip and focus more on what it takes to level up your whip speeches, what it takes to win debates as a whip. and what you should be identifying or what the problems and blunders you might be running into are that are preventing you from giving the best speeches you can.

That being said, though, I want to make clear that this also isn't just a seminar about whipping. I know speaker role based seminars tend to turn off a lot of people because they think I never speak whip, I have a partner who does whip. So why should I pay attention? But I think many of the strategic notes I'll highlight in this or things that trickle down into giving opening speeches, giving member speeches, giving extension speeches, and are things that you would generally like to identify or keep in mind in your debating as a whole.

That's a fairly lengthy introduction, but there's one last part of the introduction which is obviously this series of talks is being organized for free, so very generously by the Organizational Committee of Sandoe. That's a tournament that will be held from December 2 to 4. There's a pretty cool CAP, you guys have probably seen them. Do check it out, it'll be a good opportunity for you guys to get some pre-worlds or pre-ABP training in.

I will be there as a member of the CA team and hopefully we'll have a bunch of fun motions for you guys. So yeah, hope to see you there. What more specifically are we going to talk about in this talk? So I boiled it down into five main parts. The first is what the goals of a WIP speech are.

What do you want to achieve? And I think this... first part is something that is really what separates a lot of beginner web speeches from more on intermediate level web speeches, where a lot of the time beginners come into it, and they're immediately confused by what they should or should not be doing. They think this isn't very straightforward.

It's not as simple as just giving responses or just giving response, or just giving out the substantive case. It's very difficult to structure things at times. It's very difficult to know what you even want to do at each point in the speech, which is kind of what I want to clarify in this first part. From there, I want to move on into more details about the content. So what you want more specifically in a good whip speech, what kind of content you expect, how do you know what to leave out?

How do you know what not to do? I think many speakers have pointed out that being a good whip often feels like an impossible balancing act because by the end of a BP round, there are so many things you're managing, so many different threads of argumentation, so many different ideas that you want to get out. And sometimes the question is more of what can you leave out? What is it that you need?

don't have to say in the speech versus what is it that is absolutely necessary to getting you that win. The third part will be about structures. And this, I think, will be a more interesting part of the speech because as debating has kind of evolved, there have been more and more ways to structure BP whips.

Some are more conventional, some are less conventional. I want to walk through some of the common structures that are around in BP. I don't want to prescribe a single one and kind of let you guys see what the pros and cons of them are for yourselves. And then the fourth and fifth parts will be more notes on whipping and notes on debating as a whip. So what you should be doing in prep, how you should be working with your partner, how you should be communicating the extension, what you should be listening to in the cases of the other teams, and more broad strategic notes that didn't fit with any of the main points that I wanted to get across.

Hopefully by the end of all of this, we'll have time for questions because I think that'll be a more valuable part of the talk. So hopefully we can fit this in. 30 to 40 minutes.

Okay, let's begin with the honest concession. Whipping is hard. How do you debate when you're not supposed to give arguments? Seems like it doesn't make sense.

I know as a novice, I was very hesitant to give whip speeches or to even do the whip speaker role at all. It was always something my more experienced or more knowledgeable partner would do. And I was kind of relegated to the member position where I could give out a case that I wouldn't say was fed to me, but a case that was more structured, a case that was more prepared.

It's very intimidating to go into a closing half and be expected to give a speech without having much preparation at all. Often when you're the whip for CG or CO, you don't know what it is you're going to say. And even when you do have thoughts about how you want to structure the speech coming into it from prep, you'll...

so often have to scrap that and come up with something entirely different because the dynamics of the debate just didn't play out how you wanted them. A stellar whip speech can and has many times in the top rounds of many top tier tournaments like ADP, like Worlds, single-handedly won rounds all on its own. Sometimes the member's speech can...

be lackluster. Sometimes it can't deliver the extension as precisely as might be ideal, but a whip speech can resurrect the case. It can bring it back, pull it to the forefront of the judge's mind and make it seem like you were winning from the beginning.

But on the other hand, it's so easy for a mediocre whip speech or an average whip speech to lose the debate. It's so easy to slip up and make minor mistakes that are enough for your, even a stellar member speech or stellar extension speech to get overlooked. to get unfairly credited, to get weighed against, or to get responded to in a way that's not charitable.

So the point here is there are very, very many things that can go wrong in a whip speech, but when you get it right, and when you work on it, and when you work towards getting everything out that you should get out in the round, then your performance can really carry an entire team, can carry an entire case. It's something you'll feel proud of. I know that. there are many speakers who are sort of career in their speaker roles. So their whole time they do PM, they do DPM, their whole time they do member, their whole time they do web.

And as someone who's kind of not a career whip, but someone who's been funneled into that position over time, I can say this has been the most rewarding speaker position to do. It's not the easiest to do. It's definitely not the most fun to do.

There will be many times where you feel like you let down your team, where you feel like you didn't have the responses, you didn't have the weighing to carry the case. But when you get it right, and when you know that it was your analysis that won the round, or when you know that you defended a case that both you and your partner are really proud of, there's nothing in debating, I think, that matches that feeling quite as well. But that's a personal preference.

Obviously, I'm biased. Whipping is hard, but whipping is worth it. Let's get to the first part then. what am I even trying to do with my whip speech? What are the goals of a whip speech?

And I think these are important to take note of because a lot of the time, even intermediate or even slightly advanced speakers come into it with a very shotgun mentality. They come into it with a idea that they will just go through their flow of consciousness and say whatever comes to mind, and that will be enough to win them the debate. And obviously, while that can sometimes work, that's not a very consistent or reliable strategy or approach to whipping as a whole.

What I think is the more productive way of thinking about it is to ask yourself from the perspective of the judge what you would need to know by the end of a debate from a closing house team or from a bottom half team in order to credit them the win or in order to evaluate their extension at all. I think more specifically that comes in the form of answering three questions. The first is providing strategic positioning.

So answer the question why we win. Why is our extension the most valuable contribution in this round? What is our extension in the first place? That might seem a little confusing, it might seem a little redundant. Why is it my job as a WIP to be clarifying that kind of thing?

Shouldn't it have come out from Ember? But as we'll discuss later on, a lot of the dynamics of the debate change after your extension has been responded to. And a lot of your job at WIP will be securing the validity of that extension throughout the round, even as things evolve.

So even as new responses come up. even as an entirely new extension comes up that probably has an entire different frame, an entire different way of weighing things out or prioritizing impacts in the round, you have to explain why you still win despite all of that. Which sort of bleeds into the second goal of a whip speech, which is to clear the path for the extension. Explain why you still win. That comes in two parts.

It comes first in terms of defending against all the attacks raised by the opposite closing. So looking at the responses, evaluating them, explaining to the judge why they don't fly or why they don't take down the mechanisms they're meant to. But it also comes in a defense of validity, weighing your extension against opening. So a lot of the time, web speakers get frustrated or get undercredited and blamed for the extension not being new. It's a lot of the time, especially judges who aren't listening so clearly or listening so intently to the round.

are actively looking for ways to discredit a closing tea. They're actively looking for ways to say that the extension is redundant, it's repetitive, it's the same material, it's derivative as opening. And while that's unfortunate, that's not the way debates should be evaluated or closing half cases should be evaluated, it's something that you as the web speaker definitely have to be aware of.

Especially as rounds get closer and closer in skill, debaters get better at running their cases and there aren't these slam dunk wins or clear paths to victory you have to know how to play the margins and make it seem like you were addressing all the nuances of the openings case that were in there The final part or the final goal of a whip speech more broadly is to eliminate the chances of any other team winning. So explain why the other teams can't win. That comes in the form of responses, which I think in a whip speech is more in line of pointing out the obvious. And I'll discuss what I mean by that later on when we get to this part of the talk.

But what I will flag now is there's a lot of contention about bringing up new material in a web speech, what counts as bringing up new material, etc. I won't weigh in on that because obviously different ag cores and different circuits will have their own opinions on it. But what your job is as a web speaker, knowing that people will evaluate new material or will discredit new material, is to always make it seem like your contributions to the debate come as a direct extension of what your partner has already provided. So you don't want to make it seem as if these are your responses that you are bringing up in new way. You want to make it seem as if these are things that logically flow from what has already happened in the round or are simple observations that any observer could have made with regards to the round.

Again, we'll get back to this later on, I think it is an important part. Obviously the final part of this is making sure you don't force. So there are many times in BP when you're whipping on the back foot. where your extension didn't land as clearly as it should, where it might not have been as unique or as stellar as you planned, the impacts weren't as clear, and you now have to save your case from taking the fourth.

Or if you're in a break round, you have to save your case from taking the third or the fourth. You have to secure a position. And that's something that you uniquely do at WIP.

It's a lot harder for your member to be thinking and doing that while they're delivering their extension. So the goal of positioning your team in the round really comes down to you. And we'll talk about this more again later as we move on.

All right, let's get to the content. Let's talk about each of these more specifically. Strategic positioning, why we win the debate.

I think this really comes in three parts. The first is kind of constructing the narrative of the debate. And what I mean by that is, while you can definitely sell the extension in a very straightforward, very technical way. So you say something at the start of your speech, like the extension wins on three grounds, one, two, three, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What you really want to do in your head, and what I find is more effective to most judges, is constructing it more as a narrative rather than something that is more technical and mechanistic.

So what has happened in the debate so far? Where does your extension enter? And why is it that where you come in is crucial?

I'm sure everyone here has heard a whip. intro that goes something like this. What this debate thus far has lacked is an analysis of the interests of X, Y, or Z actor.

The reason that no other team in this debate can be credited is because they assert et cetera, et cetera, et cetera about this actor, where we are the only team that proves structurally what their incentives are. You explain in that intro what has happened so far, where your extension comes in, and why... that entry point of your extension is crucial.

Obviously, that intro wasn't the most creative, that isn't the best or most compelling intro you can come up with. But in a few lines, in as short a time as possible, as concisely as possible, explains what your entry point or your strategy for taking on the round is. And that's something that you should be conscious of during the web speech. I'm a big fan of...

putting this part of the content in the intros of a web speech, but you can also do it in other parts. You might want to front load some responses if you think they're important, front load some clarifications, take out the opposite closing team, and then put this somewhere in the middle. Or maybe even if you're very good at managing your time, put this at the end of your speech, kind of just to leave the judge with the conclusion of where you win the debate.

The point is you should have an overarching idea of what the strategy of all other teams has been. explaining why it doesn't stack up to your own strategy, and then explaining where yours comes in. The second and kind of counterpart of this is changing the narrative.

So oftentimes, your extension won't stand untouched after your member speech. So if your closing team is as intent as they should be, they're in the round, they will respond to it. Oftentimes, your closing team might even be a lot stronger than the top half teams that came before you. they might have a much newer, much more creative frame that needs to be responded to right away. Or they might just have a new piece of material that changes the debate significantly.

A good example of this is in IR rounds, where nobody really has any footing, or nobody has like the, it's obvious that nobody has the complete factual context for a situation or for a motion. You're in CG, you come up with an extension, and then suddenly you discover that CO knows everything about the motion. They have like a lot of spec matter. they have the most informed case. In that position, you want to be flexible enough to change the narrative of your case to explain why it also fits what this new priority of the debate is.

So to give a concrete example of this, I remember very vividly debating a motion about Saudi foreign policy from the perspective of the House of Saud. And I think everyone in that round... past a certain point was debating it from the perspective of MBS, so the leader of Saudi Arabia.

And while that was fine, I think a very brilliant closing team came in with the simple analysis that the House of Saud isn't just MBS, it's not just Mohammed bin Salman, it's 10,000 people who all have a royal family and their interests are very different from what the MBS is interested in. linked to the motion characterization and this more linked perspective of what the priorities of the debate should be that meant playing while you still fit those new incentives that were introduced if you wanted to stand in the debate if you wanted to have any chance of standing in debate uh yeah so that's part two so you know when to change the narrative the third thing here is to constantly be asking yourself what the debate needs. So after every speaker, ask yourself what isn't explained yet, what are things that other teams are saying but are insufficient, what are the gaps that you can identify as important, and where can you come in. So all of these things will help you develop that narrative eventually when you do have to get to your speech. So keep asking yourself these strategic questions, and by the time you get to your speech, you should have it developed already as a complete train of thought.

in your own speech. Part two, clearing the path. So what do you want to do?

How do you want to rebuild the extension? Again, I think this comes in three parts. The first is to invalidate their responses or respond to their responses. This is a lot more crucial than teams make it out to be. A lot of teams, a lot of WIPs kind of turn off their brain or tunnel vision into writing their own speech instead of listening to the member's speech before them or instead of listening to the web speech before them.

And the problem with that is you tend to overlook a lot of the strongest responses to your case and your extension. That means even if you whip that extension really well, you prove that it's the most relevant thing in the round. There are just so many logical gaps in that extension at that point in time that there's no way a judge is going to believe it. Or even if you don't think those logical gaps are valid, you think the other team had very bad responses.

The problem is that the judge... thinks there are all of these responses and all of these barriers to your extension winning the round that you have to deal with. And you don't have to deal with them in depth if you really don't think they're all that good.

You have to call out the responses as being disingenuous. You have to call them out for being weak. You have to provide an explanation, at least, for why they don't stop you from winning.

A crucial part of this that I think a lot of web speakers are... afraid to do or are kind of hesitant to do is taking cross engagement from opening. So a lot of the time, the strongest barriers to your extension flying come from the opening case, their details, their little mechanisms or little points of weighing that you yourself have overlooked. And when you don't take a QI from opening or when you kind of try to, I think the term box out is kind of outdated, but you try to make them irrelevant by not bringing them up or not giving them chance to engage with you, you run the risk of just having a very good judge who tracked all of their material, bring up the obvious that you haven't responded to.

The great thing about taking a POI from opening is you get to see what they think is relevant about their case or what they think is the most relevant response at that point in time. And you kind of get to shut it down right away. Obviously, it won't always go well.

There are times when you'll give a bad POI response where you might get caught up. off guard by the analysis that another team provides. But you have to practice it. I think the, and this speaks more generally to a mindset of debating, you have to do things that are hard as well.

You shouldn't be thinking about it just in terms of what it takes to win one round. Maybe if you're at the major, maybe if you're at the highest levels of competition, you can focus on what's right in front of you. But if you're seriously trying to improve, like in any sport, sometimes you have to do things that might make you take the L, as bad as it sounds. uh just so you can learn just so you can adapt to them just so you can build the habits of doing things that are hard and eventually get those skills so this isn't just about whipping a lot of teams are afraid of running hard cases a lot of teams are afraid of running cases that are principled because they don't feel like they're good at running principles or teams are afraid of doing econ motions because they don't feel like they're good at doing econ motions but these are things you have to practice and these are things you have to learn to not be afraid of uh that was a bit of a tangent, but I think it's important especially for web speakers to take note of.

Okay, the second part of this is extending across frames. So each extension or each argument in the round will lay out a clear priority or what you think the most important impact is. The problem is sometimes the judge won't believe that priority. So you want to show not just why your extension stands, as in it stands mechanistically, you want to show why it stands in terms of being relevant across the different frames that teams provide. So I think this is quite common when teams say, oh, it's not about economic impact.

It's about democracy or whatever. It's about this principle that we introduced in our extension. And you want to compare yourselves to those things and explain either why those priorities aren't as important as the other team makes them out to be, or explain why you co-opt those priorities or get them better. The final part. here about clearing the path or this part of the content section is making sure to compare yourself to other teams.

Don't rely on the judge to kind of go through these mental gymnastics groups for you. You want to pick up grounds for comparison with each team and win them clearly. So don't ignore your own top half or kind of neglect to mention them in your speech just because you think you are already clearly winning over them.

If you are clearly winning over them, you should be able to explain that or clarify that to the judge. in a way that's concise, that doesn't take up so much of your time, and that would allow you to move on to more responsive material. But you shouldn't leave that out of your web speech. So explain quite clearly why you win over your opening half.

So our extension provides you with X impact, or it provides you with Y analysis. The reason this analysis is crucial is because it is already winning over top half. That's because top half doesn't do this part.

of their argument that is necessary for it to fly, we provide that, which is why we're beating them. Move on to the next comparison. The point is just to make sure you have a comparison to each other team.

Don't leave that out. Okay, the final part of the content section is eliminating the other teams. So this is what people classically think of when they think about pimping. They think about responses, they think about outweighing other teams.

How do you want to go about that? The first tip I kind of want to give here is sometimes you want to dodge the fourth and build up to the first. So what I mean by that is in harder rounds or in rounds that are very close or in rounds that can go any way, like the call isn't clear, it's not clear who's winning, it's not clear which contributions matter the most, you want to make sure that you don't take the fourth, especially in a long tournament where your goal is to accumulate as many points as possible.

So sometimes you just have to pick a team to eliminate. Make sure you eliminate them first and you make sure that it's clear that you are taking it over them and then go up against the stronger and stronger teams that you want to take on. This is one way of doing the response strategy. Another way in rounds where it's clear that you are winning or where you feel like you are clearly winning, you want to do the opposite.

So in rounds where you feel like your extension is clearly winning and you have the most relevant case, you want to start by taking out. the second strongest team. So you want to take out the team that you perceive as the threat to taking the first and then move down to teams that you think might take the third and the fourth.

So it rounds where it's close, you want to dodge the fourth, and rounds where it's clear, you want to secure the first, you want to build up to the first. The second thing to point out is you should always take out the opposite closing. too many web speakers tunnel vision on the extension and lose to the team opposite them. A lot of web speakers kind of dismiss their closing, their opposite closing, and hear the first words of the extension and think, ah it's redundant, it's derivative, I don't have to listen to the rest of their case, and then they just respond to the opening team.

And then they lose, because there was something in the closing team or something in the closing case that was relevant that they just didn't listen to. So make sure you give them time of day. You don't have to give them four minutes of your speech.

If you don't feel like they deserve that, they're not that relevant. But you should be providing at least a baseline responsive strategy or a baseline weighing for why you take it over them. Don't let their case stand. So make sure you eliminate them. The third thing is about new responses.

And this is what I flagged earlier when we were at the outline. So there's a lot of contention over like what's a new response, what's new material, can whips introduce new examples, can they introduce new contexts, etc, etc. There's a lot of debate over the rules of whipping and I don't want to weigh in on that now. But in general, the way you want to proof yourself from this or you want to make sure that you don't get discredited for being new. is to frame yourself as a logical extension of your previous speaker as much as possible.

So even when you run a new response, or let's say you have a killer example, you just know it in your head that this proves the other side's case, but it didn't come out at member, the way you want to go about doing that is to mention the new response, mention the new example that you have, and then link it back to your member. This example follows very clearly the logic we lay out at member speech, which explains that, then insert the analysis that your member said. Or one of the examples that flows from the kind of argument we raise at member in extension is, and then the example that you want to bring up.

So you want to provide that new response. You want to provide that new matter. Is this sneaky? Is this unfair to your other team? unfair to your other closing team, unfair to your other opening?

I don't think so, because what you're doing when you do it this way is you are still debating with the debate that has already existed. You're not introducing anything new, you're not raising a new argument, you're linking things back to what already happened. So if you're doing this honestly, if you're doing this in a way that is really about the analysis, then the other teams would have had more than enough time to engage with it.

and you shouldn't find yourself tangential, or you shouldn't find yourself irrelevant to the round. And at that point it's fair to bring this up, it's a good way to re-strengthen your case, it's a good way to bring up new responses. And even when the response isn't new, or even when the example isn't new, it's just good practice in general to link yourself to your previous speaker to make sure that the extension sounds more coherent, to make sure that the case sounds like it makes more sense.

Alright. That brings us to the next part of this. So this is part three, structuring the whip speech.

So I have all of this content, I know what the goals of my whip speech are, I know what I want to achieve, how do I say it? There are a bunch of different ways to structure your whip speech, but I think all of them need to keep three things in mind broadly. The first is that you have to be prepared to adapt. There are different structures that work best for different rounds, different motions, different opposing teams, different judges, different circuits, etc.

The key thing here is that you, as a speaker, don't get hung up on one structure and don't try to fit one structure into a debate where it really doesn't work out. So a lot of WIPs will try to do an issue-by-issue structure in debates where the teams just ran so completely different cases that it doesn't make sense. You essentially end up with having one issue per team, at which point you might as well have done a team-by-team. Or, um... A lot of WIPs will force themselves to do a team-by-team structure in a debate where both opening and closing halves had very similar debates or had very similar cases, at which point they're repeating a lot of the same responses, they're repeating a lot of the same points of weighing, they're doing things that are redundant and wasting time that otherwise could have been spent on showing why they won the debate.

So make sure you're flexible, kind of know which structure to adapt and when. There's an age-old question of like team by team or issues. I think this is an older split in WIP approaches, but the circuits or debate circuits as a whole tend to be moving away from the split.

You want to get rid of that mental dichotomy as soon as now. You don't have to pick team by team or issues. The best WIP approach has elements of both in it. So you want to make sure you win the issues in the round, but you also have a comparison and a direct comparison against every other team.

The third thing is priorities. So any WIP structure, whether it's team by team issues or a kind of hybrid structure, should make sure you do three things. The first is you want to secure the validity of the extension in the eyes of the judge. That means making sure it stands up to response.

That means making sure it doesn't appear derivative of opening. The second thing you want to have is a response to the opposite closing hat. So like I said earlier, you want to make sure that you are listening to their case. You want to make sure that you appear engaging and you're not just trying to dismiss them so you can get away with it. And the final thing is to make sure you have a justification for why you win over top half.

That's both the long cross or the short cross, depending on which closing you are, and the comparison within your bench. So explaining why you beat your own opening, explaining why extension is better than them. Any whip structure that has these three priorities clearly done and clearly laid out should meet the goals of what you want to do with your whip speech. I'll go through a few common structures here now.

And I kind of put templates and air quotes because I don't think these are prescriptive. You guys shouldn't be taking these as like be all end all structures, but they might be useful, especially if you're an intermediate team, intermediate level web, to kind of get the flow of what you should be doing. So the first is the issue-based web. So this is kind of similar to what you'd be doing in 3v3, what you'd be doing in Asians, what you'd be doing in Australs. This is where you're going to be doing In those issues, you want to make sure that you are directly flagging the extension and the contributions of each team you're responding to.

So per issue, you want to frame the issue and explain why it matters. You want to secondly highlight your team's contribution to that issue. Then you want to respond to the relevant material from the other teams, and finally weigh out the material that came up in the issue and provide the strategic commentary. So an example of that might be like, the first issue in this debate is what the interests of X actor are.

The reason this issue matters is because the team that explains coherently what the actual priorities of the United States or the actual priorities of the actor are the team that wins the round is preconditioned to believing any of the other impacts. What we explained was, so that's highlighting your team's contribution, what did we hear in response? And then that's where you get to the responding to the relevant material from others.

You might want to delineate it. You might want to flow it as what did we hear first from closing, and then what did we hear next from opening. And or you might want to include a part there about why was what our opening provided insufficient to win this issue.

And then at the end provide the weighing and strategic commentary. So if you want to learn how to kind of do this structure, or how to master the structure, I'd recommend maybe practicing a bit of 3v3. maybe watching a few 3v3 web speeches, debates where it's more straightforward, where it's not so messy, are kind of the ones where this structure best applies.

The second structure is team by team. So the important thing I want to note here is when you do a team by team whip, don't forget to highlight the extension. A lot of whip speakers can get very excited going through a team by team whip and kind of just go into this crazy response mode.

where none of it is being tied back to what their members said, none of it is highlighting what the extension did. So at the end of the whip, you've eliminated all the other teams, but it's not clear whether or not you have a leg to stand on. And if everyone has no material standing, you're not winning the debate over them. Again, as I mentioned, you can either go through teams in the order of relevance if you want to secure the first.

If you think it's one of the debates that's clear, you want to take out the strongest teams first. Or if you want to get if there's a lot of material, it's a very messy debate. All of these teams have very different ideas of what the debate is.

You might want to go through them in ease of response. So pick the team that is easiest to respond to first. Make sure you eliminate them because it will take the least amount of time to do so. and then move on to the teams that are harder to respond to. In any case, regardless of what kind of order you select, per team you should have three things.

You should first be able to condense what their case was, so what their main contribution to the debate was. You secondly explain to, you explain your own responses to those contributions, so explain why they don't stand, explain why they're not as relevant as what you have, and then weigh them out against the other priorities in the debate. So for example, you might say something like, I first want to deal with OG. The main thrust from OG is this argument on the economic impact, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Why doesn't this stand relative to the material we provide in extension? That's for three reasons. Launcher response there.

But even if this material does stand, why is it that it is irrelevant compared to what we provide in extension? Because that also stands. And then you want to do the weighing there. assuming that their case still makes sense. And then you move on to the next theme.

Okay, so final kind of structure is this sort of hybrid structure that is a bit more straightforward. I think this is becoming more popular nowadays, but I know it is also popular in old eras of debating. Essentially, it's three parts. You first respond to your closing, your opposite closing team take out their material and make sure nothing stands.

Here, you're not doing too much of the integrated... sorry. Here, you make sure you're doing a lot of the integrated strategic commentary to explain why you're already winning over that closing team.

And then the second part of the WIP speech is you kind of have an entire section dedicated to why the extension is winning. Here your approach is kind of a little bit more like being a depth speaker, where you're not so much focusing on the extension relative to specific contributions of other teams, but just explaining why it's the most important priority of the round. If necessary, this is where you point out the shortcomings of opening. So explain why what matters in the debate is this mechanism or that mechanism or this point of weighing or this kind of perspective.

And then at the end of the structure, only at the end of this structure, do you respond to the other opening team. So you respond to OO if they had unique contributions left standing. It's kind of done in a more extraneous way.

Admittedly, this structure is a little bit more confusing. I don't expect people to get it the first time off, but the advantage of this is it lets you get through a lot of material very succinctly. And it's very good in situations where you need to flip the extension. Or so in situations where you need to adapt to a very strong closing team, or you feel like your member speech didn't do enough to sell the extension. This is the kind of structure you want to adopt, because you're essentially giving yourself like three to four minutes of your speech dedicated to just rebuilding and hyping up the extension.

So that's when this kind of structure comes in handy. Okay, so we've gotten structure out of the way. I'm a little bit behind on getting through material. So I'll go through these last parts a little bit more quickly. In prep and in round, what do you want to take note of?

In prep, you want to focus on the extension. And I think the general advice for closing teams is you don't want to flesh out your mechanisms entirely. You don't want to do the thing where you come up with like five, seven different mechanisms for a point.

Because realistically, they're going to be eaten up by opening. An opening team is going to take them, or you're going to rethink them later on in the round and realize they aren't really that good, and you're going to toss them out anyways. So what's more useful in prep, and the kind of discussion you want to have with your partner, is imagining how the round will play out. So you say, oh, I think OG will probably run this. I think OO will probably run this in response.

And I think the ways we can come in at CG are like The details are best left for later on because you want to give yourself many different options. So you're thinking, again, going back to what I mentioned at the beginning, you're thinking about the different narratives your extension can have, the different entry points your extension can have. And those are the things you want to flesh out.

You can sometimes prep a vertical extension. So if you think that it's a very narrow round, you want to be thinking, at that point, you don't want to be thinking about specific mechanisms. You want to be thinking about what areas an opening team is likely to leave out and then getting to the mechanism.

So you don't want to start with the substantive part of the case. You want to start with the strategic overview of the case. Okay, what are you listening to in the round? So while you're speaking, there are two things that are important. The first is per team, you should be listening to the key arguments, the headers, the labels that they themselves give the arguments, the main mechanisms and weighing that they give to the arguments.

and the general strategic framing of themselves. So usually this will come in like at the depth speech or at a member's speech. When they talk about their entry points into the debate, when they explain why their case is relevant to the round, that's what you want to be listening to because that's how you're going to be engaging with these teams.

You want to explain why their strategic approach doesn't make sense or isn't what's going to win them the debate. and then play around it when you're launching your own strategic approach to it. Finally, listen to your member. I know a lot of WIP speakers do this thing where they have too much trust in their member speaker and they think the extension is going to come out as they imagine it in their heads.

But realistically, Even the most gelled together teammates will have very different ideas of an extension going into the round. The mechanisms might not come out exactly as you expect them to. And there might be a lot of like analytical gaps in your member speech for a whole bunch of reasons.

Maybe they had to respond to opening. Maybe they had to respond to the other member speech before them. Maybe they had to take a POI that caught them off guard.

In any case, you should be actively listening to your member speech. And... identifying what needs work so you can fill in that gap when you come in as the web speaker.

All right, and that brings me to the final part of this, which is broad strategic notes on whipping. And this is kind of like an FAQ section, things that commonly come up or common problems that people hear. The first is, are there any differences in the approach of govwhip and opwhip? The answer is yes.

In govwhip, you want to make sure that you leave room for ways to engage with OpWhip. And what I mean by that is you kind of want to be preempting what your OpWhip will do to re-highlight the extension that came up from them. So in GovWhip, it's very crucial that you spend a lot of time taking out CO, especially if CO is strong, because OpWhip is a very powerful position in BP. Just the fact that nobody is going to respond to you. A lot of the things you say will stick.

You get the final say on weighing. You get the final say on what is relevant in the round. So as GOPWIP, you want to position yourself knowing that the speaker after you will be very strong. On the other hand, if you're AWPWIP, you want to really take advantage of that freedom.

So in AWPWIP, I think the best way to do it is to kind of step back from a... the very technical debating approach. So you sometimes want to step back from the, I need to provide new mechanisms.

I need to provide new responses. I need to get in the weeds. You want to be able to provide a more coherent, like strategic overview of what happened in the round as a whole that allows you to take control of what the judge thinks matters and what the judge thinks is winning.

That might sound a little bit abstract, but might not sound concrete to you now. That's something that I think you get more with practice or you understand more with practice, but it's something to keep in mind. Two, positioning vertical extensions.

How do you do it? How do you have the time for it? You want to start by being honest. If you're running a vertical extension, admit that it's a vertical extension. As soon as members, sometimes you want to admit that it's a vertical extension.

But then you want to explain why your vertical extension is the right place of the debate to be extending. So why are the mechanisms that you provide, the extra mechanisms that you provide, the best mechanisms in the realm? And recall, it's not enough to provide new mechanisms or additional mechanisms. They have to be so necessary to the argument that you're extending on that that argument couldn't stand without them.

So you really want to sell them and you really want to present them as crucial to the argument flying. The third strategic note you should know is you should know when you're running a small impact extension versus running a big impact extension, because that really frames how your strategic overview of the debate is playing out. So when you're running a small impact extension, you think what really changes in the debate isn't this big policy, isn't this big societal level reform. It's just the behavior of a few individuals. Then you want to say that you want to.

describe that situation to the judge. So when you're doing a small impact extension, you want to make the other teams look unrealistic. You want to explain why they're reaching too far, why their impacts don't make sense. On the other hand, when you're running a big impact extension, you want to explain why the other teams are being too unchartable, why they don't understand the full scope of emotion or what it changes in the motion.

Fourthly, on opening engagement, again, I think you should take a POI from your opening as much as possible, unless they don't raise them, or they really are just completely irrelevant in the round. The other thing is, you should know, and you should be able to point out when responses cross-apply. So when you're raising a response to closing, and that response also takes out something in opening, point that out to the judge. So take......

flag very explicitly what the material is that it also responds to. Maybe you're responding to the same premise, maybe you're responding to the same impact, and you're outweighing the same impact from opening and closing. The point is you want to be as efficient as possible with your time and find ways to lump things together so you can be more concise and so you can spend less time repeating yourself.

Okay, the fifth and final thing is what do you do when you have no extension standing? So what do you do when you feel like you've lost the round, when you feel like you're on the strategic back foot and you feel like the other teams have a lot of material that you can't get out of the way? First, don't give up hope.

So you have to believe that you can win the debate in order for you to win the debate. So don't be deflated. Don't come into it with like a negative or a pessimistic mindset.

Second, you want to admit it. that there are shortcomings to your extension to the judge. And you want to admit that to yourself. And what you want to do at that point is adopt the strategy I took on earlier, or I explained earlier, where what matters most is dodging the fourth. So take out the teams that are weakest, try to resurrect what you have left of an extension, or try to spin the extension into something else.

Maybe the team completely disproved your impact about, like one of your impacts. Maybe it disproved your... impact on family, it disproved your impact on the economy, whatever. Try to see what other impacts you can extract from the extension that you still have and what other mechanisms are still standing and see if you can sell that to the judge. Or if not, sometimes when you don't have an extension left standing or many of your impacts are thrown into doubt, you want to narrow the debate in a sense and you want to make it look like it's a small impact debate.

You want to say, we should be realistic here, we shouldn't be reaching for this big extraordinary impact. So what actually matters is this. So even if your impacts get discredited, you're providing a way for the judge to kind of believe that you're the more realistic team, believe that your outcomes are more likely, and in that sense you can kind of resurrect the narrative of an extension.

So bottom line, whipping's not all about responses, it's not all about mechanisms, it's this new playing field where you're not just dealing with technical debating, you're dealing with very strategy-based debating in Brit Park. The skill you want to develop as a whip is the ability to kind of take a step back and distance yourself from the round, know what it takes for you to win, know specifically how you can convince the judge that that is what you need to win, and then know how you can convince the judge that you have everything you need to win. Yeah, that's it for the substantive portion of the talk.

I went way over time. Unfortunately, there was more content than I anticipated, but I have about seven minutes left for questions, and maybe we can proceed to that portion. So I'm not sure how OC wants to do questions. Maybe people can just like type it in chat or send it to me on Zoom.

Okay, so I got a few questions. So the first one is privately, how do you know if you sufficiently taken down the case of a specific team, especially if you're doing the team by team structure. So how do you know when you're, you've done enough responses.

I think this is definitely a lot by experience and by feel. But I think the very simple question to ask yourself at the end of a team by team comparison is, after all my responses, can the judge still believe that their impact is realistic? Or have I done enough to make it so that the judge would have to go through so many logical leaps to still believe their impact? So.

The standard for when you should stop responding to a team, kind of subjectively, is whether you think that team is still believable after your responses. Other times it's more clear. So if you think that your material already outweighs them and you don't feel the need to make them look unbelievable, then that's enough. So one or two responses might be enough. But if the team is very strong, then you might default to a standard of mitigation rather than believability.

So if I can't disprove this team completely, have I done enough to mitigate their impact to such a point that our impacts are more important than them? Can I mitigate them enough? so that I can outweigh them, is the kind of thinking you want to do.

The second question is, is there any guideline regarding when to concentrate on writing the speech? Yeah, this is kind of difficult. I think most of the WHIP speeches, in my experience, get written unfortunately very shortly towards the last minutes of the speaker before you do.

What I think you want to do is you want to lay out portions of the speech at the beginning, when you enter the round, and then you want to write down a lot of the content of the speech at the last speaker of each team. So you'll be writing down a lot at the end of DPM, you'll be writing down a lot at the end of DLO, because by this point, you should have a pretty clear idea of what the entirety of the case is, and how you plan to respond to it. Similarly, you will be writing down a lot by the end of the member speech or the end of the gobwip speech. because that's when you have the most complete idea of it.

You should also be like listening down little responses and little mechanisms as they come out in the debate, but a lot of the hard part of whipping is multi-asking. So someone asked, how do you not get thrown off by POIs or how do you respond to them confidently? I think a big tip that people tend to forget is just take a pause, right? you don't have to answer the POI right away.

You don't have to come up with a zinger response. You can kind of wait for the speaker to keep talking. And when you listen to the question, often you can just answer it directly. I think a lot of teams or a lot of speakers try to do this thing where if they can't answer the POI, they misdirect and they try to bring it up to a different topic.

And that looks very bad in the eyes of the judge, right? because it looks like you don't have an answer. Sometimes I think you can just give a very confident yes or no.

Especially when the POIs are like, do you support this? Would you support this? Or they're trying to get you into all of these little traps.

Just give a little confident yes or no. And sometimes you might not even want to feel the need to explain yourself. I know that sounds really bad, but you will do it later on in your speech when you've come up with the answer and when you get... back to the material that they're trying to POI to you.

So when they're trying to bring something up, you can give them an answer, a short one sentence, a short one-line answer at that point. Think about it a bit while you're delivering the rest of your speech that you have written down, and then come back to it and kind of reference it. This is where I further respond to their POI. This is where I further engage with the material they brought up. So yeah, take it slow, practice taking POIs.

Eventually, you'll get through confidently. How would you handle note-taking? It's always difficult to transfer a note from each of the rest of the three teams to your whip on a particular issue within the round. Yeah, so this is very much personal preference, but the way I do it is I have a separate paper for each of the teams in the round.

So I have a paper for OG, I have a paper for OO, I have a paper for my team, and then I have a paper for the other closing team. And I have like a fifth paper where my actual speech is on. So I'm taking notes from each team on the paper of that team, and then I'm writing it down again, or I have like a little mark, or like I'll put a star where I want the response, and then I put that star in the part of my speech where I want it. Um, the other thing is, I think you don't have to take note of everything.

It's good to get in the mindset that you don't have to take note of every little detail or every little mechanism that's coming out of the other team. When they have five mechanisms for a point, you don't always have to take down those five mechanisms. What you want to get is the things I pointed out earlier. What is the point they're trying to get to?

What is the impact they're trying to sell? What is the weighing they're providing for this impact? And sometimes you can respond to it at that level. So you want to take a step back.

You want to. maybe conceive the mechanisms of their case. If they have like so many mechanisms for it, you're not going to disprove it anyways. You won't have the time.

And then instead tackle the relevance of the point. Just explain why it doesn't matter, why even with all their mechanisms, it's something that happens anyway, it's uncomparative, etc. How do you save your team from getting a fourth when you know as a whip that your extension isn't solid and the opening is a good team and already did most of the things needed in the debate? This is where you want to pick a team to kill.

pick a team, either the other opening team or the closing team, and respond to them and give them all of the responses you can give them. Really frame them as irrelevant as possible. And I think the other thing to note is what a lot of closing teams don't consider is that responses are considered extension material, right?

It's not always having new substantives or having new arguments per se. If you have new responses, you have new frames or new ways of seeing a debate, that itself is extension material. And it can often be very powerful extension material if your web knows how to sell it.

So you might say something like, yes, opening provides you with all of the substantive details. They give you all of the mechanisms for it, but they never explain why this is important. or they never explain why this is relevant in comparison to this other thing that came out of the other house. And that's where you want to insert yourself. What's something that you can't ever leave out in your web speech when you're using different speech structures?

Three things. One, never leave out an explanation of why your extension wins. So explain what your extension does, why it matters, and why that's winning.

Two, never leave out responses to the opposite. closing team. So don't tunnel vision on just shotgunning responses to the top half. Make sure you're engaging with the speaker before you. And three, make sure you secure the validity of your extension.

So aside from explaining why your extension wins, you have to do a little bit of work to explain why your extension is unique. So why is it something that's new? Why is it something that elevates the debate?

Why is it valid? Okay, I'll take like a last few questions. So how do you manage open engagement with the op web? a preemption, especially if the opening half was equally good.

So sometimes you will be in a very tough situation where both your opening team and your other closing team is very very strong and you will just have to pick one of them to outframe. You'll obviously have to trade off sacrificing one of them over the other, but I think the way you make that trade-off is you decide who is easier or who is uh yeah who is easier for the judge to believe that we win it over if it's easier for the judge to believe that you beat your closing half then spend uh then dedicate your resources to taking them out first like if you can respond to them in a short amount of time great if you need to take four minutes to respond to them but you can convincingly respond to them and make sure they can't take it over you then make sure you do that you want to be secure sometimes you have to whip for security right you you want to minimize the risk you're taking on as web speaker you And make sure you take out the people you're sure who you're responding to first. How do you effectively track what other teams are saying?

I find it difficult to listen and try and write at the same time. Yeah, this is definitely a problem I had too. It's really difficult to focus in debates at times, especially when there's a lot coming out.

Unfortunately, I don't think there are many good systems for doing it. The first is obviously to practice. The more you debate, the more you realize that people are following templates.

People are following structures where they highlight what's most important. The other thing is don't be afraid to lean on your partner. After your member has spoken, they're not doing anything. They might be writing a POI, but make sure you take full advantage of them.

So ask them to write down responses, ask them to track the other WIP speaker or the other member speaker so you can kind of distribute the work. I think what a lot of teams don't get, especially in formats like 3v3, is that listening to another team and tracking a case should be a team effort. It shouldn't just be up to the speaker.

It should be something that everyone's collaborating on. What can you do to start learning to multitask if you struggle to do that in a debate room? I think this depends a lot on your personal preference.

But for, I think... The easiest way to do it and the easiest way to practice it is try to practice your listening skills. So when you want to practice multitasking, you want to practice doing the things independently at first, right? So you want to practice listening and you want to practice thinking and writing responses or writing your speech. Lots of people get sucked into the part where they practice writing their speech.

They go into debate round after debate round and they just keep writing things down. But the problem isn't in writing their speech. The problem is in listening.

So you might want to step back. You might want to try to judge a tournament. You might want to try to be an observer for a tournament or watch a training round and kind of just focus on the listening to the debate part without the pressure of having to come up with a whip speech or having to come up with any speech whatsoever. Just listen to what you think is important.

Listen to how the speakers are delivering the material and notice what you wouldn't otherwise have noticed in a debate speech. If you're the kind of speaker that records rounds or if your institution like records training rounds, one of the things you can do is go into a training round keep your notes from that training round and then after that round is done, listen to that round pick up on or look back at your notes and notice what you missed. So you can kind of identify the gaps in your listening skills.

This is kind of not a debate related thing so much. Obviously different speakers will have different ways of doing it. I know lots of people like myself who are challenged at paying attention and it's really difficult to track, especially when there's so many things going on in the debate, when so many things are going on. coming up.

So I don't want to say that there's one clear way to do it, but yeah, practice both sides of it. So last question, is there anything specific to avoid doing as a whip that can be very detrimental to your bench? Yeah, I think there's a couple things.

The first is don't lie about what another team is running, or don't lie about another team's case. A lot of whip speakers I don't want to say do it maliciously, but do it because they're a little bit afraid of taking on the material head on. So instead of engaging with an actual argument that the team raised, they'll kind of come up with a straw man or they'll kind of like discredit teams unfairly, especially when they deal with their own top half.

So a lot of WIP speakers, especially when you're transitioning from being a novice, will just lie about what their top half presented. They'll be like, top half didn't say this, they didn't say this, they didn't have any mechanisms for their arguments, they didn't have any impacts. And it just gets to the point where it's so obviously false, or it's so obviously disingenuous, that no judge is going to believe you.

And as a result, the credibility of your extension and the credibility of your case as a whole kind of become less believable. So don't lie, don't misrepresent other teams, engage with them fairly, take on their material fairly. If you don't understand completely what they're saying, flag that, like be honest, like their argument wasn't clear to me, or it didn't make sense to me, but this is what I got from them, this is the impact I heard from them, or maybe the fact that it didn't make sense to you is something that you can call out, it is a detriment, so they lack clarity, you're just not sure what impacts they're going for, be honest with what your thought process is, be honest with how you're appraising other teams, and like don't lie, or don't make up mechanisms for them, okay. It's 8.08, we went a little bit over time, so I think I'd have to end the talk here.

Thank you so much to everyone who dropped by, thank you for all the wonderful questions. Again, hope to see you guys at Sundo, it's going to be a very fun tournament. We also have more workshops in store from OC and other members of the Agipur on other very interesting topics, so hopefully we see you guys there.

Thanks everyone!

Transcript for:Mastering Whipping in VP Debating

Transcript for:
Mastering Whipping in VP Debating